Think Again: Democracy

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Foreign Policy, Summer 1997

The often dramatic global democratic trend
of recent years has put the subject of democracy onto the front burner of international
relations. Despite centuries of reflection and research on the subject, our
knowledge of democracy continues to grow, sometimes causing us to rethink what
we have already learned. These are some ideas that need careful consideration.

There are many forms of democracy.

Not exactly true. The democratic systems of
Costa Rica, Great Britain, India, Sweden, the United States, and so forth each
have their particular features. But what matters most is that they share basic
elements of an underlying liberal democratic model. What is notable about the
recent democratic trend is the similarity of the political aspirations of such
different societies, from Mongolia to Mali to Macedonia, and the conformance
of those aspirations to that basic model. The idea of "Asian-style democracy"--rule
by a dominant, corporatist party that tolerates a limited opposition but never
cedes power--does have some credence in East Asia. In general, though, the notion
fashionable in the 1970s that democracy would branch out into a range of fundamentally
different forms--socialist democracy, African democracy, Arab democracy, Latin
American democracy, and others--has lost much credibility. Telling a young,
politically active Latin American or East European that "of course your country
doesn't want Western-style democracy; I know you want to find your own special
path based on your own national traditions" is effectively an insult.

You know a democracy when you see one.

Not always. In this way, at least, democracy
is not like pornography, a term that U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart
eschewed defining in the early 1960s, famously concluding "I know it when I
see it." The basic liberal democratic model is indeed clear, and there are obvious
cases--long-established democracies and outright dictatorships--where it is
easy to give a thumbs up or thumbs down. The democratic trend of recent years,
however, has produced a profusion of ambiguous situations--countries with consistently
stated democratic intentions but hazy political realities hovering between democracy
and nondemocracy. Is Ukraine a democracy? Peru? What about Armenia, Colombia,
Mexico, Pakistan, Senegal, Thailand, and Uganda? Based on the old Cold War habit
of dividing the world into black and white, policymakers like to describe the
post-Cold War world as a two-color map of democracies and dictatorships. In
reality, the map contains large amounts of gray. In its annual surveys of democracy
and human rights, Freedom House has found in recent years that a growing percentage
of countries that are formally democratic are only partly free--in other words,
there are more and more countries that have succeeded in achieving the basic
form but not the actual substance of democracy.

New democracies cannot carry out tough economic
reforms.

Wrong. This notion, still sometimes overheard
in the corridors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, is a
version of the old idea that Third World countries are not ready for democracy.
In other words, what they really need are some good dictators to whip them into
shape. Fledgling democracies may find it difficult to endure shock therapy and
economic restructuring, but some important cases of recent years--most notably
in Argentina, Brazil, and Poland--disprove the dictum that elected governments
in transitional countries can't administer harsh economic medicine. It is worth
remembering that most Third World dictators fail miserably to apply rational
or successful economic policies. The Pinochet model remains very much the exception
rather than the rule. Note also that the leaders of many new democracies resent
doubts about their mettle. The real issue, they say, is whether old democracies
are capable of facing up to their own economic problems, such as social security
reform, entitlements spending, and chronic deficits.

Democracies don't go to war with one another.

Sounds terrific. This new truth, delivered
to Washington in the early 1990s from the immaculate laboratories of academe,
quickly became a favorite of Clinton speechwriters and peace-studies gurus.
It may be appealing, but its validity as a political science rule exceeds its
utility as a tool for policymakers. Nasty little exceptions like the recent
fighting between Peru and Ecuador spoil part of the fun and have to be explained
away (it wasn't really a war, just some bloodshed over a border, and, hey, Peru's
not all that democratic). Moreover, recent research by political scientists
Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder shows that while well-established democracies
are indeed relatively peaceful, countries attempting to become democratic are
more rather than less prone to go to war. Given the current proliferation of
countries wandering uncertainly through that transitional state--and the large
number of countries still ruled by autocrats--don't expect Immanuel Kant's Perpetual
Peace to kick in anytime soon.

The greatest threat to most new democracies
is a military coup.

True 20 years ago but not anymore. Nowadays
the main threats are skyrocketing crime, rampant corruption, high inflation,
unemployment, and plain old governmental ineffectiveness. The militaries in
many former dictatorships are still lurking, powerful institutions. They are
wary, however, of getting stuck holding the reins of government in countries
that may be coming apart at the seams. Robert Kaplan, the popular purveyor of
global "chaos theory," is too gloomy by half in his sweeping predictions of
rising anarchy. He is right though that the nightmare scenario for many shaky
countries is not harsh military rule: It's criminalized civilian rule or no
rule at all. Moreover, the recent events in Albania harshly demonstrate that
this phenomenon is by no means limited to the developing world.

Economic development and political development
go hand in hand.

Not so fast. For decades political scientists
and political economists have been agonizing and arguing about the relationship
between economic development and democratization. The 1960s view that emphasized
tensions between economic development and democracy has largely given way to
the pleasing idea that the two are closely linked. The temptation always is
to settle on a single overarching conclusion. New research by political scientists
Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi shows, however, that the economic-political
relationship, while indeed crucial, is not reducible to a single formula. The
emergence of democracy is not, they argue, a byproduct of economic development;
democracy can be initiated at any level of economic development. Once democracy
is established, however, the influence of economics becomes crucial: The richer
the country, the greater democracy's chance of survival. Poor countries face
long odds, but the direction of economic life is more important than the absolute
level: Democracy is more likely to survive in a country with a growing economy
and a per capita income of less than $1,000 than in a country with a per capita
income of between $1,000 and $2,000 whose economy is declining.

Promoting democracy in other countries is
a particularly American preoccupation.

Not anymore. A striking feature of the rapidly
growing world of foreign assistance programs specifically aimed at promoting
democracy is the broad expansion of such efforts by countries other than the
United States. The United States may still be the largest player in this domain,
with around $400 million per year devoted to such efforts. But the end of the
Cold War and the global spread of democracy have prompted a surprisingly diverse,
active stream of new prodemocracy programs. For decades, Germany has been promoting
democracy around the world through its generously funded political party foundations.
But almost all foreign aid donors, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Great
Britain, Holland, Japan, Norway, and Sweden, now carry out democracy assistance
programs, whether in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, countries of the former Soviet
Union, Latin America, or the Middle East. Even the French are jumping in with
plans to create a democracy promotion foundation run by the leading French political
parties. Don't hold your breath, though, for a change in France's archaic, antidemocratic
policies toward Francophone Africa: Some things remain sacred.

Democracy cannot be exported; it must be
grown from within.

A good applause line at academic conferences.
It doesn't take much traveling around the world these days, however, to recognize
that the "contagion" effects of democracy have been a major factor in the proliferation
of democratic transitions all around the world. And one cannot spend much time
in countries attempting to democratize without encountering a palpable desire
among many persons to learn from more established democracies. Democratization
will have to be worked out in each country by the people of that country. But
there is often considerable space for positive influence from the outside. When
Paraguay's elected government was almost ousted last year, an array of external
actors rapidly and successfully applied pressure to keep it in place. This emergency
prodemocracy campaign involved not only the United States and the Organization
of American States, but also Argentina and Brazil, two states previously known
for their stubborn defense of the principle of nonintervention in other countries'
internal political affairs.

The Clinton administration should stop wasting
precious foreign policy resources on democracy crusades, as in Haiti, and concentrate
on America's core economic and strategic interests.

The Clinton administration should stop selling
out its foreign policy principles for the sake of business and geopolitical
interests, as in China, and start backing up its rhetoric on democracy and human
rights with some real action.

These sound like two "agree or disagree" entries
on a dating questionnaire for lonely hearted foreign policy junkies, but they
sum up the polarization that afflicts the democracy promotion debate in the
United States. The truth lies in the middle--a bit dull, but this is ultimately
where it belongs. Under Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton, democracy promotion
has been one of America's main foreign policy goals, alongside global economic
and strategic interests. Often democracy complements those other interests,
in which case the United States supports it. Sometimes democracy conflicts with
those interests, in which case it is essentially ignored. And many times U.S.
policy toward a particular region or country is full of mutually conflicting
threads, some prodemocratic and some not, reflecting our uniquely open-ended,
American process of foreign policy formulation. In those cases we muddle through
and explain to our confused foreign partners, "What do you expect? This is democracy."

Want to Know More?

To read further on this subject requires considerable
selectivity, as the amount of literature on democracy has expanded even faster
in recent years than the trend toward democracy itself. An excellent starting
point is the new book by political scientists Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan,
who address the difficult question of how societies can go beyond initial democratic
openings to the actual consolidation of democracy: Problems of Democratic
Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist
Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Political scientist
Philippe Schmitter seeks to go beyond "transitology" to "consolidology" in his
"Transitology: The Science or the Art of Democratization?" in Joseph S. Tulchin,
ed., The Consolidation of Democracy in Latin America (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner, 1995). Larry Diamond, coeditor of the Journal of Democracy,
offers a realistic, thorough exploration of whether the global democratic trend
has come to an end in "Is the Third Wave Over?" Journal of Democracy
7, no. 3 (July 1996). The state of democracy in the world and the proper place
of democracy promotion in the Clinton administration's foreign policy are examined
in Thomas Carothers, "Democracy Without Illusions," Foreign Affairs 76,
no. 1 (January/ February 1997). Political scientists Adam Przeworski and Fernando
Limongi present a systematic, eye-opening analysis of the relationship between
economic development and democracy in their article "Modernization: Theories
and Facts," World Politics 49, no. 2 (January 1997). Former French Foreign
Ministry strategic affairs adviser Philippe Delmas, an accomplished French realist,
casts a pox on the democracy house in his new book, The Rosy Future of War
(New York: The Free Press, 1997), arguing that strong, stable states, and not
democratic states, are the key to international peace and security.

End of document

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